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Here in our lovely country we have a saying that would describe what I have been doing lately. After censoring it would translate to “If you have an itch somehwere… “, you have to scratch it. You just had to scratch it, didn’t you? And today I had an itch and I boy did I scratch it.

Basically the whole “problem” was that I wanted to modify the main menu so that it would change after obtaining some endings. The whole thing escalated into me redoing the whole code for ALL the menus. I have to “translate” every customization into the screens.rpy file. Yes, I touched the feared screens.rpy file! Le gasp!

I only did the main menu, which works, the navigation menu which also works, and the damn preferences menu which I cannot get to work and I don’t know why! I’ll try not to think about it, since I might start crying in frustration.

I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore, so I decided to do something else. Point management I shall call it. Which to me is making a huge graph of all the choices and places points are assigned. So I went through the whole game and did a review.

Here are some things I realised I have to consider :

All chars should have roughly the same max points. Because I want all of them to be equally hard to get.

All chars should have enough special events as well as mandatory events.

All chars should be interesting in their own way. Damn hard to do this one. Even though I can’t help having a favorite, if these guys were real I’d want to be friends with them all.

Choices should be a mixed bag. Some should be rather easy (What do you think x thinks about me? vs What do you think about me?), some are medium (choose a gift based on the guy’s interests/conversation you should have had with him if you were pursuing him) and some are pretty much impossible to tell the outcome of (stay home or go to the park). I have quite a few choices that I would consider hard, usually in conversations. Ex: Tell him out front or tease him about it. But once you read what happens, I think it becomes much clearer.

Each character should have points that are easy to get as well as points that are harder to get, all must have 2-point answers as well as answers that subtract points.

It’s hard to find the right balance and I’m still working on it. It’s pretty tiring calculating what points whould be places where to insure fairness for all. Sometimes when I’m tired I have conversations in my head with my characters. That’s totally normal, right?

For a computer game in which everything is 100% digitally made, I sure have used a lot of paper…